Miscellaneous laptop discussions forum: what's the best notebook for art and graphics programs

If you really want to do all of those tasks well, you're going to have to spend a lot of cash on a pretty high-end system.

Like the previous person said, the Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 is a pretty good choice, but it's significantly more expensive than the Inspiron 9300, which--if configured well--should suffice.

As always, desktops would be more powerful at these tasks.

-Jason
http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/~jasonhe/

You're stating what's required for his uses; if he wants the laptop to perform very well and if he can afford it, surely a better CPU would be great.

-Jason
http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/~jasonhe/

video editing, photo editing, illustrating, gaming, and animation programs

implies mostly 2-d. Animation, he didn't exactly specify, so i said decent, not best. CPU speed, how much do you really need? Can't be as much as video editing. RAM, notebooks always have slower ram, just get 1gb or 2gb. Definitely good screen.

Not to get into a huge Mac/PC debate but...

I work on both machines, and have for over 10 years. In my experience, ALL of the graphics editing software (EXCEPT for Quark, which does run better on a Mac) run equally good on high end Macs as they do on PCs. The whole OS stability thing is some serious propoganda too. I've crashed the Macs easily as much as my PCs have crashed, its not a design flaw exclusively to PCs, its a design flaw inherent in human beings for not being perfect. That said, you could spend over $3000 dollars on a mac laptop that would be the equivalent in performance to a $1700.00 PC. In fact, I would argue that the 3000 dollar mac would underperform in some aspects (.i.e. the Graphics cards offered by mac are slightly a generation behind, they use ATI 9700s and such, while the 1700 dollar PCs use Nvidia 6600s). Also, I'm not too sure if Mac even offers a screen resolution of 1680, unless its on the 17" laptop (you can get up to 1920 on many PC laptops, even 15 inch ones).

I would personally recommend getting a Mac. For $2,000, you can get a very nice Apple PowerBook 1.5GHz G4, 512MB RAM, 80GB Hard drive, Combo DVD/CD-RW drive, ATI Radeon 9700, etc. Or you could wait until the new Intel Macs come out. But I wouldn't use a Windows PC for all the stuff you have listed except for gaming. The Mac OS is a much more solid OS than Windows.

Most everyone here voting for a WIndows based platform obviously has some computer know how. But I doubt any non technical person can set up a new Windows system in an hour and have it run without problems. Any novice can set up a Mac in an hour, as well as add programs, periferals, updates with ease. No viruses on the Mac, Windows always gets viruses unless your tech saavy and know how to work around this. Of course the Mac has always been more expensive, but better designed and built with few PC exceptions. If you just want speed, and your priorities are more towards gaming and 3d modeling buy a PC. Otherwise the graphics cards, processor speed are fine for any graphics program you can use. (of course a great designed package and interface make the Mac most attractive to graphics professionals.) Afterall, designers appreciate design. That is why they are drawn toward the Mac. Sony is the only other design oriented computer company I have seen (VAIO) and it shows in their laptops. Of course they are expensive as well.

I recommend you look at the brand new HDX series that Hewlett Packard puts out. They have both a 16" and 18" model. It comes to you with high definition and a host of features. The only drawback is that these monsters weigh alot.

If you only plan to keep it docked..then I would seriously consider the HDX series. The high definition will stun you !

Jesse Jr.

Even though Compaq R4000 comes with very fast CPU, lots of RAM and pretty decent graphics card, I don't recommend it for graphics/image/photo/video/illustration/annimation editing. It may good for gaming but it doesn't have the vivid graphics quality and doesn't look great in comparisson to my old Compaq 700 and HP 5440 that I am still using for image editing.

Just because the industry as a majority is using it, does not necessarily make it better. Understand that Apple targeted designers as their demographic. From the slick ad campaigns to the attractive, tactile design look--apple has been selling a design EMOTION more than it is actually selling well priced TOOL for designers.

I just find it funny that the people in the industry know that their job is to make their customers' products look better than the competition, regardless of whether it actually IS better. The same holds true for Apple. The hardware for Apple computers is overpriced, and inferior to the PC architecture period. Just ask the CEO of Adobe when he spoke in regards to Steve Jobs "switching" to Intel, "Steve, its about time."

Allison,

By far the biggest issue with trying to use notebooks for art applications is the fact that the brightness and contrast changes radically as your angle of view changes. That does not occur at all on decent quality LCD desktop monitors. Consequently, serious graphics pro's never do critical work on notebooks (unless they have no other choice). It is simply impossible to know the actual brightness/contrast/hue/saturation you are getting.

All the other issues raised on this thread are extremely petty --virtually meaningless compared to the screen consistenty issue. You should only do pro graphics on a hooded, hardware-calibrated LCD monitor of 19" or more. If you travel, you should take it with you.

Other than that, any old laptop will do. You can get the cheapest HP, Compaq, Dell or Toshiba @ Target or Walmart and it will perform just as good as the priciest MacBook Pro or high-end PC notebook for 99% of on-notebook work. The only difference you might notice with a higher end notebook is if you used the external monitor output of your notebook to drive an external display (such as the afforementioned desktop LCD) The higher end model would likely have a better graphics chip and therefore support higher resolutions on the external monitor. But finding out which external resolutions are supported on different models can be very difficult and the price difference is as high as buying a desktop box to to support the desktop monitor.

The only choice you really have with today's technology is to use a desktop sytem or to redo your work after you see your work posted out on the internet (on a monitor other than your notebook's) and relaize the color's/brightness/contrast are not what you thought they were. Since you probably meticulously slaved over the color tones, option B is not very desireable. Best you can do is just go with the largest notebook display available. That alleviates the issue to some degree. Most important, make sure your display (notebook or desktop) is hardware-calibrated.